The First Four starts it, the Final Four ends it.

We’ll have a more in-depth discussion on this later this evening, but the new format for the 68-team NCAA Tournament has just been announced.  This article by ESPN’s Andy Katz describes how the NCAA is going with what people call the “hybrid model.”  The last four at-large teams will play each other for the right to get into the main draw, and the last four automatic bid teams will do the same. They’re calling it the “First Four,” or the new official first round.  The seed line will be determined independently for each game, meaning that two teams may be playing for the right to snag a 11-seed and play a six, and another First Four game might have two teams battling for a 12-seed to play a five, and so on.

There will now be no speculating as to who the last four at large teams into the Big Dance are — you’ll know who they are by their presence in one of the Tuesday/Wednesday games.  Unfortunately, there won’t be any “mixing” of the automatic qualifiers and the final at-large teams.  As aforementioned, the at-larges will play each other and the automatic qualifiers will play each other, so you won’t get that small-conference tournament winner relishing their chance to knock off a BCS-conference team who’s among the last four at-larges.  And, interestingly, after several years of seemingly downplaying the importance of a team’s RPI, it’s certainly important now, because that is the instrument that will be used to determine the lowest-rated automatic qualifiers.

The NCAA goes with the hybrid model. We're still evaluating this...

The First Four games will be broadcast on Tru TV, so you better check your cable lineup to make sure you get it.  Also, according to Katz, there was no early indication that the games would be moved from Dayton, the traditional site of all previous play-in games, though we expect that’s where the discussion will move to, now.

Former Kentucky center Melvin Turpin, aged 49, has died by his own hand at his home in Lexington earlier today.

Known popularly as “Dinner Bell Mel” because of his size, and “The Dipper” because of his mass and his combination of strength and finesse around the basket, Turpin played four seasons at Kentucky from 1980-84 and comprised half of the  famed Twin Towers duo, along with Sam Bowie.  His play during his senior year earned him first-team all-SEC honors and spots on many 2nd- and 3rd-team all-America lists.  He was drafted sixth overall by the Washington Bullets in the 1984 NBA draft and was traded almost immediately to the Cleveland Cavaliers.  Due to his weight struggles, Turpin only played five seasons in the NBA, his best season coming in his second year, averaging 13.7 PPG and 7.0 RPG for the Cavs in 1985-86.

Lexington police responded to a “personal injury call” at Turpin’s home late on Thursday afternoon, and local news outlets began reporting and tweeting more grave concerns as the coroner arrived on the scene.  The suicide was unfortunately confirmed soon after.

Turpin was a visible figure around Lexington and occupied a special place in the hearts of Kentucky faithful because of his often self-deprecating sense of humor and his friendliness toward his fans.  Our prayers go out to Mr. Turpin’s family and friends at this confusing and awful time.

1. Behold, the power of KenPom. On his blog, Mr. Pomeroy lists the ten most unlikely wins of last season in a two-part post, but don’t be surprised if you don’t remember a lot of them.  It’s a great read, and the statistics add to the wonderment, but this is not necessarily a list of big upsets like Pennsylvania over Cornell, or Northern Iowa over Kansas. By “unlikely wins,” he means games in which one team got down by a large amount and had an incredibly low probability of coming back to win, but did.  Great stuff as usual.
2. Somebody please explain to us why this isn’t being televised.  On September 18th, Bob Knight will be roasted by the likes of Steve Alford, Isiah Thomas, and a few rivals of Knight’s from his coaching days.  If this is going to be a real, honest roast and the speakers plan to get in some good licks on The General, we’d like to watch this for two reasons:  first, to watch Knight make mental notes of who’s saying what about him so he can keep it on file in his brain; second, because this thing is going down at a casino, to be privy to the conversations that would happen if these guys get good and lubricated around a blackjack table at three in the morning.
3. In a story appearing on a blog of the Birmingham News, one of Eric Bledsoe’s relatives and a family friend claimed yesterday that they — and not Bledsoe’s high school coach, Maurice Ford — helped pay the rent for Bledsoe and his mother during Bledsoe’s senior year of high school.  Also, the landlady of that property is also disputing her account of the situation originally published by the New York Times, which broke the story over a month ago raising the possibility that Ford had injured Bledsoe’s amateur status by assisting Bledsoe and his mother by paying their rent on occasion.
4. Two ex-Kansas athletic department officials have now been charged in the federal probe of the KU ticket-scalping debacle.  Last week, former assistant director of ticket operations Jason Jeffries was charged with “misprision of a felony” for his role in the scandal, and yesterday former assistant AD for sales and marketing Brandon Simmons received the same charge.
5. The Pac-10 couldn’t be any worse next year than it was last year, could it?  It just has to be better…right?  Well, SI.com’s Ann Killion isn’t bullish that the conference’s final season in its ten-team form will be any better than the 2009-2010 edition.

Karen Sypher’s credibility just took a(nother) hit.

Earlier today it was revealed that Sypher, the woman who claimed that Rick Pitino raped her and who allegedly attempted to extort $10 million from the Louisville head coach, had also lodged false claims of sexual harassment against another Louisville man back in 2001.  This AP report posted on FoxSports.com details how Sypher had consensual sex with a Louisville businessman nine years ago (the man is now dead, by the way), and was subsequently hired by him at his auto glass business.  When the man’s fiancee found out about his relationship with Sypher, he broke it off.  Sypher then claimed to be pregnant, and sued this guy for sexual harassment.  No criminal charges ever materialized.

Last year, you may recall, Sypher claimed that, in 2003, Pitino raped her on two different occasions.  This accusation came after Pitino revealed that Sypher was attempting to extort ten million bucks from him, and he even admitted to a consensual affair with Sypher (remember the Porcini’s incident?) after she came out with her rape claim. Prosecutors say that a few weeks after the consensual sexual affair, Sypher told Pitino she was pregnant and wanted money for health insurance; prosecutors say that pregnancy was eventually aborted, and it’s been reported that Pitino paid for it.  It was six years later that Sypher then attempted to extort the money from Pitino.

Today's revelation doesn't paint Sypher in the best light.

Now that you’re up to date on the events of last year, what does it have to do with Sypher’s upcoming extortion trial which starts on July 26th?  Well, if prosecutors can establish a pattern of this type of behavior from Sypher, it makes it easier for a judge to see her dealings with Pitino as a planned scheme, and makes it appear more likely that she did indeed attempt to extort Pitino — a charge she told federal prosecutors was without basis — which could land her in some seriously hot water.  Multiple extortion attempts, lying to federal prosecutors, false rape charges…not exactly the kinds of things that judges tend to blow off or be too warm and fuzzy about.  Rick Pitino has by no means been just an injured innocent in all of this, but despite her initial accusations regarding Pitino, it’s Sypher who could wind up in the most legal trouble.

Deion Jackson-Houston, a Dallas high school basketball prospect originally from Duncan, Oklahoma, was killed this past Saturday.  He was visiting family in his hometown for the July 4th weekend and, as he was driving back to his grandmother’s house after an errand, his car was struck by a train as he drove through a railroad crossing which lacked warning lights or a mechanical barrier.  Jackson-Houston had just turned 17 on June 23rd.  A member of the class of 2012, he had been recruited by several schools, many of them in Texas, but ranging throughout the country.  The Dallas Morning News has a writeup of the incident, an account that is as heartbreaking as it is complete.

Please understand, we know that this kid was more than a college basketball prospect, as the title to this post suggests.  At the very least, he was a son and grandson, an uncle to two nieces — the eldest of those is a mere three years old — a brother, and obviously a friend to many.  We didn’t know Deion, so there’s no way we can even begin to comment on what he meant to those around him, or try to estimate what the family is going through right now.  For what it’s worth, our thoughts and prayers are with Deion and his family.  Not to get too cynical, because we’re all for kids having fun, but we hope that if there are any big-time high school prospects out there who are more worried about how lavish they can make their college announcement parties and how many TV stations and websites they can get to broadcast and live-stream them, maybe  just one of those guys will read about Deion, understand how very lucky they are, and realize the unimportance of such fleeting adornments.  Requiescat in pace, young man.

1. Let’s just get this out of the way early: Damon Evans has officially resigned as Georgia’s AD.  He’s got enough on his mind, so we see no need to pile on any further.
2. Stan Heath guided South Florida to a tidy 20-13 record last year and 9-9 in the Big East, a 125% improvement in the Bulls’ best-ever Big East tally.  He was rewarded with a four year extension to his current contract, so he’s locked down until 2015.
3. Ouch.  Former Kentucky big fella Daniel Orton’s line in his first summer league game for the Magic:  three points (on 1-8 shooting), five fouls, four turnovers, and an ejection.  But that’s one of the purposes of the summer league, right?  We’re sure Orton will get the kinks worked out, and kudos to him for staying positive.  But some of the takes on his rocky debut have been pretty funny.
4. Rivals.com lists ten hot-seat coaches for next season.  We don’t know about Bruce Weber, but it’s hard to argue with the other nine.
5. The gentlemen at Scout.com have released their spankin’ new top 100 list of high school recruits for the class of 2011.  It’s always fun to look at the “Schools of Interest” column on these lists; of the top six, John Calipari’s already nabbed two of them and is in the running for three others, but, examining the whole list, one can tell that the boys at Ohio State and North Carolina aren’t exactly sleeping on the job.

In this age of shrinking cereal boxes and contracting newspapers — our local paper is now the size of a DVD box, it seems — we read with wide eyes the three-part series on expenditures in college athletics by AOL Fanhouse’s Brett McMurphy, especially the third offering which detailed how much money Duke spends on men’s basketball and how it compares to the rest of the college basketball world (there are links there to the first two in the series, as well).  According to McMurphy’s statistics, which come from the US Department of Education, Duke wasn’t just the top spender on men’s basketball during the 2008-09 season — they spent more money on men’s hoops than 22 programs in BCS conferences spent on football.  The men’s basketball budget at Duke for that season totalled $13.87 million, with Marquette — which doesn’t have a football program — coming next at $10.3 million.  If there’s some chance that you think that such spending doesn’t necessarily translate to success on the court, consider that ten of the 12 biggest spenders on men’s basketball have been to a Final Four since 2003.  There’s a wealth (pun intended) of great stuff in the entire series of articles, not just in the third part linked above; we could pore over those revenue, expenditure, and money-based win/loss tables at the end of each installment for hours, and we suggest you check out all three articles for yourself.  As we read, though, we kept wondering about Duke’s opponent in March’s title game, the Butler Bulldogs.  More on that in a second.

Duke -- your champs in basketball, and spending on basketball.

When people talk about spending disparities in sports, the consensus favorite example is to compare the New York Yankees‘ payroll to…well, anybody.  According to The Biz of Baseball, at the start of the season, the Yanks had the highest payroll of any MLB team — no surprise there — with a total layout of $206,333,389.  Even though most people assume it’s the Royals, the team with the smallest payroll on Opening Day of 2010 was the Pittsburgh Pirates, who shell out $34,943,000.  This results in a Yankees-to-Pirates spending ratio of just under 6-to-1.

According to Basketball State (which is a college basketball stat nerd’s paradise), the exact expenditure for men’s basketball at Duke for 2009 was $13,873,859.  The expenses for Butler’s men’s basketball team totalled $1,729,754.  This reveals a Duke-to-Butler expenditure ratio of slightly over 8-to-1.  Understandably, the eyes go right to the amount that Duke spends, but we feel that 8-to-1 ratio is the real newsmaker.  We’re certainly not taking anything away from Duke’s title or how deserving they were of it, but is there any sane person out there who would argue that Duke was eight times as skilled or deserving of that title than Butler?  An 8-to-1 spending ratio is just a ridiculous figure, considering how close the Bulldogs were to winning the title last season, and it truly underscores the magnitude of how much they achieved. If you look at the charts from Mr. McMurphy’s third article in his series, you’ll notice that Butler doesn’t even appear on the top 20 list in terms of men’s hoops expenditures of non-BCS schools.  In fact, not a single Horizon League team shows up there.  “Cinderella” is a word that gets tossed around too much during NCAA Tournament time, but it certainly applies to Butler’s run — and near-victory — in the championship game a few months ago.

So, the next time you hear someone talk about spending disparities in sports while making a big market-vs-small market argument, let them roll out their Yankees-Royals or (if they’re particularly well-informed) Yankees-Pirates stats.  You can then counter with the fact that, as wide as that gulf is, Duke’s spending ratio over the team that gave them all they could handle in the championship game was 33% larger than the biggest ratio that the Yankees enjoy over anyone.  In that light, Butler’s exploits during the 2010 NCAA Tournament are even more remarkable than previously thought.  Also makes you wonder what the Padres can do this year, since they’re next-to-last in terms of MLB payroll and currently sit first in the NL West…

Andrew Murawa is the RTC correspondent for the Pac-10 and Mountain West conferences and an occasional contributor.

The NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Committee met this week in Chicago, and the biggest item on their agenda was to decide on the format of the new 68-team tournament. In deciding to expand from the 65-team tournament, which has been the rule for the last ten years, to 68 teams in time for the 2011 tournament, the NCAA has committed itself to four opening round games.  The questions of who will play in those games, however, and where those games will take place, among other logistical issues, are still to be decided. While it doesn’t look like a decision will be announced this week, outgoing committee chairperson and UCLA athletic director Dan Guerrero has spelled out three possible options for who will compete in the opening round games:

1. The teams that would be the 16th and 17th seeds in a bracket, or those teams seeded at spots 61 through 68 in the overall field — likely teams from the historically one-bid conferences,
2. The last eight non-automatic qualifiers or the teams generally referred to as bubble teams — generally teams from a mixture of BCS leagues and mid-major conferences, or
3. Some combination of the first two options, with the most talked-about scenario being the last four bubble teams playing in a couple of games and the lowest seeded automatic qualifiers (seeds 65-68) playing in the other two.

While it is still within the realm of reason that additional options could arise (maybe the lowest seeded automatic qualifiers each match up against one of the bubble teams), the answer will likely be one of the three options above. And, frankly, option three is a bit of a copout, so the decision between options one and two comes down to something of a battle between the big power conferences and the less influential conferences that nonetheless make up the bulk of Division I. And neither side wants to play in those games.

Should a conference champ be sent to an opening-rounder and have a better chance to make more money, or should their performance be rewarded with a spot in the main draw?

“I think that if you are an automatic qualifier, you should not be in a play-in game,” said Winthrop head coach Randy Peele when we talked with him earlier this week, and he’s had experience with the opening round game as the coach at a school that has now appeared in two opening round tournament games, including last season’s loss to Arkansas-Pine Bluff.  Peele’s sentiment was echoed by Michael White, the Associate Athletic Director for Communications at East Tennessee State University. “For teams like ours that come out of a league with one tournament bid, and to have to earn it by winning our conference tournament, we don’t want to have to be sent to a play-in game.”

Even the term “play-in game,” used in reference to the single opening round game played in Dayton for the last ten years, is a divisive one. The NCAA has gone to great lengths to make sure that game was referred to as the “opening round game,” despite it commonly being referred to by fans and media as the play-in game. “The way the NCAA markets the first day is critical,” said ETSU’s head coach Murry Bartow. “They shouldn’t be marketed as play-in games, where you’re not even in the tournament until you win that game.”

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Over the course of the next month until the NBA draft on June 24, RTC will be rolling out comprehensive profiles of the 30-35 collegians we feel have the best chance to hear their names called by David Stern in the first round that night.  There won’t be any particular order to the list, but you can scroll back through all the finished profiles by clicking here.

Player Name: Patrick Patterson

School: Kentucky

Height/Weight: 6’9/235

NBA Position: Power Forward

Projected Draft Range: Late Lottery

Overview: John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins may have been flashier and grabbed more headlines, but if you ask people around Lexington who their favorite Wildcat was from this past season, Patrick Patterson’s name will come up more than you’d expect.  While his numbers were impressive enough (14.3 PPG, 7.5 RPG, 1.9 BPG), that’s not what Kentucky supporters use as the reason for their reverence — and reverence is the right word, there.  They’re quick to point out that those numbers were actually down from the previous season (17.9 PPG, 9.2 RPG, 2.1 BPG), and the reason they were down was because he was fine with scoring less and yielding the spotlight to his aforementioned young teammates, as that’s what the team dynamic required.  They love talking about how he finished his bachelor’s degree in three years, while at the same time going far above the call of duty when it came to community service and public appearances during his time in the Bluegrass.  In short, people in Lexington love this guy, and why shouldn’t they?  He played three seasons that can be credited to three different head coaches; he was recruited by Tubby Smith, played two years for Billy Gillespie and a final one under John Calipari.  Basketball wasn’t fun at UK for those first two years for the players or the fans, and especially not for Patterson, who didn’t even get to play in an NCAA Tournament.  You couldn’t blame Patrick if he had sulked in his dorm room for a while and then caught the first bus out of town.  Instead, he flourished — in the classroom, on the court, and in the community, knowing if he kept working hard that sweeter days would eventually come.  Those sweeter days arrived last season.  And the next one is Thursday night in New York.

Patterson finishes confidently at the rim, but it was the jump shot he debuted last year that wowed scouts...and fans.

Will Translate to the NBA: Patterson’s physique got more impressive each year at Kentucky, the biggest and quickest transformation coming last summer when he moved out to California and worked with a personal trainer.  His body is therefore NBA-ready, and it also speaks to his work ethic.  He’s also shown that he’s willing to eschew personal glory in favor of the betterment of the team, and there might not be a better “character guy” in the draft.  He added a jump shot over the summer before last season, then hit it consistently during the year, a move that greatly increased his appeal to NBA scouts, and it goes nicely with the fair range of post moves he already possesses.  Whether it’s him who scores or not, good things tend to happen when he gets the ball in the post; he’s a nice interior passer and easily finds the open man on the perimeter.  He was an underrated defender down low at Kentucky and seems to love going body-to-body with opponents who are trying to overpower him.

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Over the course of the next month until the NBA Draft on June 24, RTC will be rolling out comprehensive profiles of the 30-35 collegians we feel have the best chance to hear their names called by David Stern in the first round that night.  There won’t be any particular order to the list, but you can scroll back through all the finished profiles by clicking here.

Player Name: Hassan Whiteside

School: Marshall

Height/Weight: 7’0/227

NBA Position: Center

Projected Draft Range: Mid First Round

Overview: Hassan Whiteside surprised a lot of people when he spurned several SEC schools to play his college basketball at Marshall University, but his attendance at a comparatively small school didn’t mean the NBA scouts wouldn’t find him.  They didn’t need to search very hard. Whiteside’s impact on the Conference USA landscape was immediate, posting a 14 point/17 rebound/9 block performance against eventual NCAA second-rounders Ohio University early in the season.  He’d end up with three triple-doubles on the year — the first three ever for Marshall — all with blocks as the third statistic.  His 12 other double-doubles helped propel the Thundering Herd to an overall 24-10 record and 11-5 in a very competitive CUSA.  His 182 blocked shots was tops in the nation, averaging out to an amazing 5.4 BPG.  And even though he was only there for the one year, he ended up as the all-time leader in blocked shots at Marshall.  Mind you, we don’t mean for a freshman — that’s for a career.

Defensively, he's ready. And it's funner to learn offense. (C. Jackson/Herald-Disptach)

Will Translate to the NBA: Obviously his shot-swatting prowess is his biggest asset, and will be the primary reason for any early minutes he gets in the league, but he’s no single-note player.  He’s not just a tall, thin, awkward shot-blocking specialist. He’s good at using his size to get in position for grabbing boards, and shows a knack for peeling off more than his share of offensive rebounds.  He has better hops than most players his size, and he gets off the floor quickly.  Hassan is one of those players who, when you see him play, you can tell how much fun he’s having and that will endear him to teammates and fans.  And he knows what it takes to be a professional athlete; his father played five seasons of professional football in the NFL and CFL.

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